Fleur Olby

Fleur Olby’s delicately sensual photographic work is about the environment, the transformative spirit of nature and the experience or sensation of ‘beauty’. Her practice developed through an aesthetic focus on still-life photography and the colour white, a professional grounding that along with many years’ experience of studio work for editorial, design and advertising clients, led her eventually to the subject of natural light, while concurrently researching Goethe’s Colour theory on the refraction of light from black.

Her photography could be described as an exploration of the line of abstraction, from film processing and digital capture to where a photographic image connects to an abstract emotion. Memory of, and movement through nature – experience of the differing scales of plants, gardens and landscape alongside a paradoxical engagement with the static image, create a convergence  in her work which capturesboth motion and stillness: lightness and dark.

The limited editionPoa Triviali,created by Fleur for Field Editions,is an image taken from her recent publication: Velvet Black,now included in the National Library of the V&A collection of Artists’ books. Images from Velvet Blackare exhibiting currently in the show On Making, at The Photography Gallery in Gdansk’s National Museum, Poland and the publication launched at Impressions’ Photobook Fair in 2018 and is also available at, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool and the Vitrine at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. This is the first publication from her long-term body of work, Colour from Black.

Fleur Olby is an award-winning, emerging photographer who has been widely published and commissioned and whose work has been internationally exhibited. Select exhibitions include The Romantic Landscape, Norderlicht House of Photography (2018);Phormium, and Damson Hawthorn, The Shutter Hub Open, London.(2018); The World Through My Eyes,The Gala Awards, Barcelona.(2018); The Tree, in The 5th Biennial, Barcelona. (2018); The Swiss Camera Museum (2017) and Physicality as Land Connection, featured on Fotofilmic (2017).

Her work has featured extensively in leading international and UK publications including online photography magazine, LensCulture and news magazines of The Independent; Sunday Times; Financial Times and Observer. In 2001 she was awarded a Silver D&AD for work commissioned for the Eden Project, for the most outstanding design photography. Her monograph ‘Fleur Plant Portraits’ was published by Fuel Publishing in 2005.

Fleur Olby lives and works in north Yorkshire.